Sound on Sound magazine April 2009

For all of you interested in Modular synths, I recommend getting a copy of April 2009 issue of Sound on Sound, which runs a feature article on Modular Synths, including MOTM.

See the Sound on Sound website for more details.
The picture shows part of the 'Fat Bastard' synth owned by Lester Barnes.
T J

The future

Big changes are ahead in my personal life, as I've accepted a position with a local gasturbine generator manufacturer, and will be saying goodbye to my seafaring carreer, finally I must add :-)
This new job will still mean a lot of travel on my part, and I will have to see how I can schedule my life and how this affects my hobbies, although I think I'll be able to spend more time on that, or at least more regular. While this may mean that this blog will not get updated as frequently as I'd like perhaps, I do hope that these updates will be an interesting read, as I will be re-united with my MOTM on a more frequent basis, and will work on patches etc more often. John L Rice has inspired me making his Youtube video's, and I am considering doing something similar too, I will need to buy a video camera at some stage to provide good quality footage, but we'll see about that in due course.

I'll keep you all posted.

T J

17000

17000 visitors already, it's adding up , thanks everyone :-)

Wow time is flying past and I'm not getting much further musically, or with my MOTM, still finding myself doing all sorts of DIY around the house, painting mostly, but eats up valuable MOTM time, or any synth time for that matter, note to self: gotta sort that out.....
Having said that, have had time to quickly play around with my Roland JP8000 today. A friend and I were discussing VA synths the other day, so I thought I'd play around a bit with the only hardware VA synth I own.. Kind of lusting a bit after a bright red Nord Lead at the moment though....

T J

A hint of what's to come

Those of you navigating to the Synthtech website, may already have noticed it, but the player I mentioned in my last post is now alive on their site, as well with a few more hints of things to come. Looks like the website is about to get a decent overhaul. Paul Also reports that the backlog is getting smaller and smaller in regards to outstanding orders, and soon he'll be able to concentrate fully on the future of MOTM, and next up is the Cloud generator, the Euro rack derivative E340 VCO, and a 'surprise' frack rack module.

As for my own progress, I've replaced the backlight in my 01/W, and is as new now, ready for several more years of service.
Next I've also replaced the backlight of my Kurzweil K2000RS, which took only 20 minutes (it's a really accessible synth, a testament to it's good design, although the rack is probably easier than the KB version), compare that to the 01/W fd which took a few hours, simply because nearly everything needed to come out to access the display..So now it's hightime to continue with the modification of my MOTM-800 envelop generators. :-)

T J

My antics

I haven't written in almost a week, and for good reason, I've been very busy doing non synth related work and fitted a bathroom suite at home, plumbing tiling etc. all fun (not) but that's all done now.
In the meantime I have received the PCB's from Tellun for the MOTM-800 modifications I've been planning, and I have received shipping confirmation for my EL-foil backlight for both my Kurzweil K2000, and my Korg 01/W FD, they should be here soon too, so I have a few things I can get on with soon.
Also, I've been playing around a bit with my synth in evening times, just patching a bit, and trying to get some idea's for music projects I'm working on, so I hope to have a few more things to 'show' you soon.
In the meantime, Synthesis Technology is working on a redesign of their website, and I've seen the beta version of their sound player that is going to be incorporated in their new site (link removed at the request of SynthTech), and it looks great and works very well too, it's a promising new feature of the new website, which will hopefully launch soon :-)

T J

EL backlight foils

Yes, this has nothing to do with MOTM, but everything with synths. My favorite digital synth has a weak backlight so the display is hard to read. I've looked at the usual sources but every message I send them remains unanswered till this day, so I looked further and found a new source for replacement backlight foils for the Kurzweil K2000. The link is :
right here
Backlight4you ships foils etc for a lot of different synths (SY77's, Korg 01W, Akai samplers etc etc) so this is bound to help a lot of you I hope, so hence I posted this as a service to the synth community as a whole, they accept paypal and some creditcards.



T J

Hear the drummer get wicked!

Well, it's John L Rice actually, demoing the use of the MOTM-730 as a trigger for drum patterns, sounds fantastic John!


How this patch was made can be seen on this picture, click on it to view full size version :-)



T J

Another Synth

Yes I know this is an MOTM blog, but I just wanted to report on my latest synth. I went on E-bay, just browsing around and found a Korg 01/W FD on offer. I've always liked this workstation synth, because of it's sonic character, and the elaborate pads and whooses it can produce, it's quite a reasonable alternative to the Korg Wavestation, but less the vector control and a few other tid bits. So I bid on it, only once, and not expecting to win it at all, but low and behold I did, for a mere £137,- I am now the owner of a 01/W FD in pretty good condition. It doesn't have a resonance filter and only a LPF filter, but it has a waveshaping synthesis which is quite interesting and different sounding from my other synth, so I look forward to put this thing to good use in my future musical projects, besides it also offers reasonable master keyboard functions so it's a great synth to control the MOTM with, but more on that another time.
For more on the 01/W FD go here.

T J